Comment 0 for bug 1779863

Background:
NodeJS has a native extension API: https://nodejs.org/api/addons.html
It's fairly understood by developers that NodeJS's ABI is stable, and that one module built using a version of nodejs should work on another semantically version compatible of nodejs.

NodeJS exposes various third party libraries to the native module developers. Quote from the addons developers page: "Node.js includes a number of other statically linked libraries including OpenSSL. These other libraries are located in the deps/ directory in the Node.js source tree. Only the libuv,i OpenSSL, V8 and zlib symbols are purposefully re-exported by Node.js and may be used to various extents by Addons."

It's fairly understood by developers that native modules have the same ABI guarantee than the rest of the node API.

The NodeJS ecosystem uses native modules extensively, and it's fairly common for developers to publish precompiled versions of their extensions so that the typical end-user can simply npm install their dependencies without worrying about having a compiler installed. Some packages will do their own thing (see for instance https://www.npmjs.com/package/uws), while others will rely on third party extensions to facilitate their work. See for instance prebuild (https://www.npmjs.com/package/prebuild) that has a handful of dependents, or node-pre-gyp (https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-pre-gyp) that has north of 350 dependents. So the nodejs ecosystem has roughly 400 native packages that are publishing prebuilt versions of their extensions.

Problem with the Ubuntu nodejs package:
Put simply, it breaks prebuilt packages that depend on OpenSSL. NodeJS 8.10.0 officially comes with OpenSSL 1.0.2n, while the NodeJS 8.10.0 that comes with the Ubuntu package exposes OpenSSL 1.1.0g.

Since there are ABI breakages between OpenSSL 1.0.2 and 1.1.0, these ABI breakages are bubbling up to any prebuilt native addon.

Here is an example:

https://github.com/nicolasnoble/openssl-nodejs-ubuntu-demo

If you build this package under the mainline nodejs, it will try to import the following symbols from OpenSSL 1.0.2:
 . SSL_library_init
 . SSLeay_version

Whereas if you build it under Ubuntu's nodejs, it will try to import the following symbols instead from OpenSSL 1.1.0:
 . OPENSSL_init_ssl
 . OpenSSL_version

Therefore, trying to load one prebuilt module from one version of the runtime to another will result in a symbol loading error:

node: symbol lookup error: /home/pixel/node-openssl-addon-example/build/Release/openssl_example.node: undefined symbol: SSL_library_init

Incidentally, nodejs 10.5.0 uses OpenSSL 1.1.0h, and compiling the same demo module with this version of node will try to import the proper symbols. Obviously, since the module will be built for the wrong version of the nodejs runtime, it won't load, but the SSL symbols are now proper.

This creates weird bug reports for nodejs extension developers, such as https://github.com/grpc/grpc-node/issues/341

Another example is uws. Trying to use uws in ubuntu's nodejs will result in the same sort of failures. Which means there are at least two packages available out there that are affected by this issue.

I don't think this is easily solvable, and all of my suggestions for fixing it have severe cons. Ubuntu won't want to downgrade their system's OpenSSL for this. Maybe there's a way to get another openssl package for 1.0.2, and have the nodejs runtime for Ubuntu depend on it. Another possible solution would be to radically upgrade nodejs to 10, so that the ABI of OpenSSL will then match properly. But this may be viewed as a too radical upgrade.

One sort of mitigation option would be to get node-pre-gyp and prebuild to recognize that it's running with this version of the nodejs runtime, so that it can recognize and take actions, such as downloading an ubuntu-specific version of the prebuilt extension, or recompiling from sources. This obviously would help mitigating the issue for a good portion of existing packages that are using node-pre-gyp and prebuild, but for packages that are doing their own thing such as uws, this solution wouldn't work properly.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: nodejs 8.10.0~dfsg-2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-24.26-generic 4.15.18
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-24-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Tue Jul 3 05:34:28 2018
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-03-08 (482 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" - Release amd64 (20161012.2)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nodejs
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-05-10 (54 days ago)